Some two decades back, I read a book by Raj Mohan Gandhi, titled Understanding the Muslim Mind. The book is about eight great Indian Muslims, including Muhammad Ali Jinnah
and Liaquat Ali Khan, who shaped the destiny of the Muslims of the
subcontinent. I thought of doing a similar book that would provide
insight into the Kashmir mind. But then I asked myself, could any of
them really be called great men?

The eight people Raj Mohan Gandhi has written about are truly great
minds and out of them I see Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the greatest, for his
“indomitable will”. Also, as put by his biographer Stanly Wolpert, “his
place of primacy in Pakistan’s history looms like a minaret over the
achievements of all his contemporaries.”

In my search for finding what was missing in our contemporary
leaders, I found that instead of redeeming people they have pushed them
into a morass of uncertainty. I had an opportunity of finding a Jinnah
outside his famous biographies. In two articles about him, I found a
Jinnah that has hitherto remained eclipsed from people — one by his
sister Fatima Jinnah titled “A businessman Becomes A Barrister” and
another by Sadat Husain Manto called “Jinnah Sahib”.

His sister says his eager mind was keen to benefit from his visit to
England at a time when the spirit of British liberalism was making
profound impact on the minds of people. He adopted the typically English
habit of reading carefully his morning newspapers. About his joining
the Lincoln’s Inn, Fatima Jinnah quotes his brother as saying, “My
inquiries and discussions made me decide for another inn than Lincoln’s.
But then I saw the name of the great Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) engraved
on the main entrance of Lincoln’s Inn among the great lawgivers of the
world. So I made a sort of vow that I would join Lincoln’s Inn.”

Saadat Hasan Manto’s writings on Jinnah makes
for an interesting reading in that he talks about the lifestyle of this
great leader, his relations with his sisters other than Fatima Jinnah
and with his servants and drivers. “The Quaid had three sisters, one of
them lived at Chowpati and her husband did not earn much. Jinnah Sahib
would send her some money every month.” Jinnah played billiards and
would hit with precision. Manto also wrote that in politics “the Quaid
never made hasty decision. As in billiards, he would examine the
situation from every angle and only move when he was sure he would get
it right the first time”.